April 05, 2012

If you’ve been reading The Study’s wall-to-wall Opening Day coverage today, you’ve learned that today’s baseball fans are a vengeance-hungry, price-sensitive bunch. But was it always that way? What about the fans of yesteryear?
A fascinating 1990 study provides rare insight into the makeup of some of the game’s earliest fans—people who attended Cincinnati Reds games in the late 1880s.

March 30, 2012

Two of the country’s best-known urban thinkers have a discussion underway at Atlantic Cities and New Geography about changes in the urban hierarchy brought along by globalization. It paints a picture of globalization as a zero-sum game in which one city’s growth comes at the expense—at least relatively—of another’s. They suggest that peaks—concentrated centers of population and prosperity—get higher while valleys—economic left-behinds—get lower.
Global competition certainly can sap a region’s assumed strengths and lead to periodic even multiple decade long population decline if a transition in

March 06, 2012

I'll leave it to others to make the general pronouncements about how Mitt Romney's middling performance Tuesday night against deeply flawed and overmatched opponents showed yet again what an astonishingly weak frontrunner he is. Instead, I want to focus in on a geographic irony that emerged more clearly Tuesday night than it has in the earlier primaries. Namely, that Romney does well in the places where Barack Obama does well, and he does poorly in the places where Obama does poorly.

March 05, 2012

Both Jonathan Chait and Jonathan Cohn today noted the utter incompetence of Mitt Romney’s GOP rivals when it comes to basic opposition research, as shown by their failure to dig up two 2009 statements in which Romney supported a national individual health insurance mandate. These statements are completely at odds with Romney’s claim throughout this campaign that he has never backed a national individual mandate, but rather simply thought it appropriate for the people of his own state. Yet Mssrs.